Restarting explorer does not restore taskbar

Question

I've been having a really annoying problem with explorer in Windows 7. Sometimes I need to restart explorer, for example to help testing software I'm developing.

I know I can stop explorer.exe (either through the task manager or through the Ctrl-Shift-Right Click on menu / Exit Explorer thing) and restart it through the task manager. That used to work just fine on XP. But on my Windows 7 box it just pops up a file browsing window. No taskbar, no start menu, no desktop.

Of course I can logout or restart to get the taskbar back, but that gets annoying really fast.

Any clues to what's going on here? Is something preventing explorer from restarting the taskbar? What's the mechanism used by explorer to determine whether it should do so?

[Update] I'm not looking for alternative ways to restart explorer. I found plenty of those while Googling for a solution to my problem. I need to know why explorer is not restoring my desktop icons and taskbar after it is restarted.

Solution 1

Just had the same problem. It seems that when you run explorer.exe without full path it starts as C:\windows\explorer.exe /factory,{682159d9-c321-47ca-b3f1-30e36b2ec8b9} -Embedding, as you see, with parameters.

The solution I found, is to specify full path to C:\Windows\explorer.exe. This should run explorer without parameters. And starts Windows Taskbar.

And I really don't know, why such behaviour happens, cause before it worked fine without full path.

Solution 2

Press Ctrl + Shift + ESC. Go into Processes and stop Explorer.exe, as you already described. Then go to Applications --> New Task, type in explorer and press Enter.

That should work, if not try and go to Google. Search for explorer.exe and replace it. Good luck!

Solution 3

I had the same problem, and thanks to the answer by Jens Erat, I was able to find another solution! I've been repairing computers for years and have not seen this problem. Unfortunately, Jens' answer was not what did it for me, but while I was in that part of the registry, I saw a problem with the userinit key. The key had "c:\windows\system32\Userinit.exe."

The answer was to simply delete the extraneous period at the end of the path and start explorer again. Solved. Such a nice fix. I wonder how it ever got messed up in the first place. MalwareBytes did detect 50+ objects, however, which may have had something to do with it.

Anyways - a haiku for everyone to enjoy:

Yesterday it worked.
Today it is not working.
Windows is like that.

Solution 4

1. Press ctrl+shift+esc to open task manager
2. Click new task and type regedit and press enter
3. In registry editor, go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon
4. Beside the string value Shell the value data should be explorer.exe. Any value other than that can cause this error.

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Comments

[Friend of Kim]

Do you have 64 or 32 bit?

[Marnix van Valen]

Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit

[Franck Dernoncourt]

"And I really don't know, why such behaviour happens, cause before it worked fine without full path." -> the same happened to me. Have you found some cause(s) for it since you wrote the answer?

[Marcus K.]

No idea how and why, but on my WIndows server, the entry was changed to something like "powershell.exe -noexit". You saved my day!

[NetVicious]

That GUID doesn't works today. Any tip about how to search for the current GUID?

[Keith Tyler]

That is kooky. Thanks, it solved my problem. Idk why full path is a different behavior.